What happened to the Project Import Wizard?

Funny thing that happened to me while doing some security testing on Project Server 2013. I was attempting to import some local resources from an .MPP file using the Import Resources to Enterprise wizard. (like I’ve done many many times before) And the weirdest thing happened…

The current view would shift over (like it always does) but the Import Resources Wizard was missing. Very Strange!!

This was the first time I used Project Pro 2013 with SP1. So my first thought was maybe there was a security change in the wizard. Or the Macro settings needed to be changed to Enable all macros in the Trust Center. So I go to make the change and restart Project Pro and still get the same result. So I change the setting back.

I then reached out to a few of my colleagues and they haven’t seen that behaviour either. I did get one friend that told me to try repairing the Project Pro installation. At this point I had nothing to lose, so I gave it a go.

But that didn’t fix it either

IE Security Settings

I reached out to Brian Smith from the Project Team and mentions that he “suspects something IE related is blocking this from loading”. And that it was “implemented as an iFrame”. I thought was very interesting because I knew there were security settings in Internet Explorer for iFrame and frames.

So off I go to Security settings of IE as the PWA site was already added to the Trusted Sites zone. So I click on Trusted sites and then click on Custom level…

About 2/3rds of the way down, there’s a setting called Launching programs and files in an IFRAME (which is what I was hoping what the problem was) but unfortunately it was already set for Prompt.

But the next setting was named Navigate windows and frames across different domains and that was set to Disable, so I changed it to Prompt and clicked OK twice.

I then closed Internet Explorer and Project Pro 2013 and restarted my computer. I then re-launched Project Pro 2013 and logged in to Project Server 2013. I opened my local .MPP file and from the Resources tab, I clicked Add Resources –> Import Resources to Enterprise and voila there it was the Import Resources Wizard!!

Now for the real strange part, I tried to replicate the problem by resetting the custom security setting in Internet Explorer back to the original settings and it still displayed the Wizard. After talking with Brian he suggests that it might be a caching problem (with either Internet Explorer or Project Pro).

In any case I thought I would post my experience with the “Missing Project Import Wizard” just in case somebody gets this problem they might fix it doing the same thing I did.